In the beginning, there was the void,
And then there was the lens,
Glassy, unblinking, turned outward
Toward mountains, rivers, and the faces of kings.
But the lens grew lonely, or perhaps just bored,
And in a twist of silicon narcissism,
It turned one hundred and eighty degrees
To face the creator.
The arm extended, a human boom,
And the thumb hovered, a trembling executioner,
And the shutter clicked.
The first pixelated soul was captured,
Not for art, not for history,
But to say, “Look at me, looking at myself.”

We live now in the Age of the Extended Arm,
A specific epoch of human evolution
Marked by the peculiar development
Of the “duck face” and the “smize.”
It is a strange time to be alive,
Where the proof of existence is not
“I think, therefore I am,”
But “I posted, therefore I was.”

Let us look at the numbers,
Those cold, hard digits that define our vanity.
If you walked down a busy street today,
In New York, or London, or Tokyo,
And tapped every shoulder you passed,
Over sixty-two percent of those souls
Would have their face stored on a server somewhere.
They are the initiated.
They have cast their reflection into the cloud.
If you look at the youth, the fresh-faced inheritors
Of this digital earth, the number climbs.
Ninety-five percent of them,
Almost every single one,
Has frozen their grin in binary code.
They are the soldiers of the front-facing camera,
Marching into the future, chin tilted down,
Lighting perfect.

But why?
Why do we do it?
Why turn the camera from the Grand Canyon
To the nostrils inhaling the canyon air?
Psychologists, those weary observers of our folly,
Have categorized our hunger.
Thirty-six percent of us claim it is for “memory.”
We say we want to remember the moment.
But really, do you need a photo of your face
To remember that you ate a taco?
Is the taco not memorable on its own?
Or is the memory insufficient
Unless it is stamped with your watermark?
We take them for validation,
The sweet, dopamine drip of the “like,”
The little red heart that beats faster than our own.
We take them to compete,
A silent war of “My life is better than yours,”
Fought with filters and angles.
We take them because we are bored,
Because the elevator ride is ten seconds too long
To be alone with our thoughts.

And the volume!
Oh, the sheer, crushing weight of our faces.
Every single day, the sun rises,
And ninety-three million new selfies
Bloom like algae on the surface of the web.
Ninety-three million.
That is more than the population of Germany,
Every day, uploading their pores to the ether.
If you count them all,
The ones on Instagram, the ones on Facebook,
The ones rotting in old Myspace graves,
The ones hidden in the dark vaults of iCloud,
The ones locked behind the velvet ropes
Of paywalls and subscription services,
Where the selfie becomes a transaction,
A commodity of flesh and pixel,
The number creates a vertigo of zeros.
We are talking trillions.
Three and a half trillion, by some estimates.
A number so large it ceases to be a number
And becomes a geological layer.
Future archaeologists, digging through the silicon strata,
Will not find pottery or arrowheads.
They will find hard drives choked with us.
They will find three and a half trillion attempts
To find the good side.

Who are these archivists of the self?
They are young, mostly.
The average age of the selfie-taker
Is twenty-three point six years.
A tender age.
Old enough to know better,
Young enough to care deeply
About the approval of strangers.
The curve bells sharply around the youth.
Gen Z, the digital natives,
Snap three times as many as their parents.
They have never known a world
Without the ability to curate a face.
But the elders are learning.
The Boomers are catching on,
Holding the phone low, looking confused,
Creating accidental masterpieces of chin and ceiling.
The disease is contagious.
It spares no demographic.

But let us talk about the “long run.”
The grand, existential promise of photography.
We tell ourselves we are building a legacy.
We are leaving a trail of breadcrumbs
So that future generations might know us.
“Here I was,” we say,
“In the bathroom with good lighting.”
“Here I was, holding a latte.”
“Here I was, pretending to be asleep.”
We imagine our great-great-grandchildren
Scrolling through these archives with reverence,
Teary-eyed at the beauty of our filters.
“Look,” they will say,
“Great-Grandmother looked stunning with dog ears.”

The reality, however, is a cruel joke.
The internet is not a library;
It is a landfill in a hurricane.
The sheer volume of data ensures our obscurity.
When everyone is famous, no one is.
When there are three trillion faces,
No single face matters.
We are drowning in our own documentation.
The servers will rust.
The formats will change.
The passwords will be lost.
And even if the files survive,
Who will have the time to look?
Your thousands of selfies,
Each one a desperate plea for permanence,
Will become digital dust.
They will be compressed, archived, and forgotten,
Buried under the avalanche of the next generation,
Who will be too busy photographing themselves
To look at you.

And consider the things we do not photograph.
The back of your lover’s head while they read.
The way the light hits the floor, sans your shadow.
The empty chair.
The unobserved moment.
We have trained ourselves to see the world
Only as a background for our heads.
The Eiffel Tower is just wallpaper.
The Taj Mahal is a prop.
The Mona Lisa is a supporting actor
In the movie of You.
We have shrunk the universe
To the size of a smartphone screen,
And placed ourselves in the center,
Blocking the view.

We are ghosts haunting our own lives.
We verify our presence
By removing ourselves from the moment
To capture it.
“Hold on,” we say, stopping the laughter.
“Let’s take a selfie.”
And the laughter stops.
The spontaneity dies.
We compose ourselves.
We suck in our cheeks.
We perform happiness instead of feeling it.
And then we post it.
And we wait.
We wait for the ping.
We wait for the validation.
We wait to be told that we exist.

In the long run,
When the sun expands and swallows the earth,
Or when the power grid fails for the last time,
The selfies will vanish first.
The stone statues will outlast them.
The oil paintings will outlast them.
Even the graffiti scratched into a bathroom stall
Will have a longer shelf life
Than your cloud-stored visage.
You are not building a monument.
You are whispering into a hurricane.
You are writing your name on water.

So take the photo.
Or don’t.
The server farm doesn’t care.
The future doesn’t care.
The lens is indifferent.
It only reflects what is there:
A human, searching for connection,
Searching for permanence,
Searching for a signal,
In a world crowded with three trillion other ghosts,
All of them smiling,
All of them alone,
All of them waiting for the flash.